Last week, as Zimbabweans celebrated the military backed process which set in motion the end of Robert Mugabe’s rule, a cautionary statement came from Everjoice Win, an astute Zimbabwean feminist and activist; in a pithy distillation of Shona folklore, the feminist wrote on Twitter, “musapururudzire shavi muchiti mudzimu,” which the rough translation of this [...]

Vuyo Aaron Ngqondwana was one of the hundreds of psychiatric patients moved out of Life Esidimeni in callous cost-cutting measures by the Gauteng Department of Health. He was moved to the Cullinan Care and Rehabilitation Centre, where he died months later. An autopsy found a large plastic sheet in Vuyo’s stomach. He died of [...]

An extract from Sisonke Msimang’s memoir “Always Another Country” On 16 August 2012, in a small town called Marikana in South Africa’s dry, rusty platinum belt, the South African Police Service opened fire on a crowd of striking mineworkers. We were in America when this happened. I watched the video footage online in horror. Thirty-four [...]

he photographer and filmmaker Peter McKenzie died on October 13 2017. He will no longer “make pictures”. That distinction between “taking” and “making” photographs was important to McKenzie, as a photographer, an intellectual, an activist and an aesthete. He did not believe that photography should be extractive, so rather than “take” photographs, he would “make” [...]